By Barry Hampe– It is precision flying at low speed and a high angle of attack. It is the definitive skill that sets Navy carrier pilots (and Air Force exchange pilots who have flown with a Navy carrier squadron) apart from all others. It’s interesting to note that military uniforms have all sorts of badges and doodads to show that the wearer has qualified in this or that, but there is no doodad for carrier landings. They are included in the gold wings a naval aviator wears.
It has been a very long time since I’ve made a carrier landing, and in the interim, carriers and aircraft have gotten bigger and more sophisticated.. But the principle remains the same: fly the plane aboard the ship at the slowest speed at which it can be done safely.
Like any critical flying skill, it’s something that is practiced over and over until it becomes second nature. Here’s a secret about flying. When you start to learn something new, such as formation flying, instrument flying, gunnery, or dive bombing, it’s hard, scary, and it seems like things happen way too fast, before you are ready. That’s why you practice. And practice, and practice. Take dive bombing. Back when I was learning to drop a bomb on a target (long before smart bombs) the routine was to roll into a forty degree dive at 8,000 feet, place the center dot of the gunsight below the target, and let it walk up to the target so it is dead on just at the time to drop the bomb. That was at 3,300 feet. Drop the bomb and start a pull out at 4-5 Gs. Okay. The first time I did it, all I cared about was knowing when I got to 3,300 feet so I could pull out. I’d heard stories about pilots having target fixation and flying into the ground. The dive, which actually took about 15 seconds, seemed to take no time at all. I’m not sure where the gunsight was in relation to the target. My focus was on a safe pull out. Time passed. We kept practicing. What I began to notice was that time seemed to slow down. The dive took longer in subjective time. I had time to look around, check my altitude, check the sight, and actually fly the plane into a better position before dropping the bomb, still at 3,300 feet, but no longer a panic point, simply the altitude to push the bomb button, and start a pull out.
It was the same with carrier landings. Long before actually landing on a carrier we practiced at an auxiliary landing field. We went over the routine again and again and again, getting comfortable with the procedure. As with dive bombing, the first attempts were tense, scary, and flashed by much too quickly. Again, the immediate concern was doing it safely more than doing it well. But, as usual, there comes a time when things slow down and you “get ahead of the plane,” so you can make it do what you want, rather than just reacting to whatever is happening.
Then out to the ship to do it for real. Make six OK landings and you’re qualified. This is what the landing pattern looks like.
We enter the pattern astern of the ship, as shown on the right side of the diagram, and fly up the starboard side in a flight of four at 500 feet of altitude, The leader breaks to the left when well ahead of the ship, makes a 180 degree turn and flies downwind. Each of the other aircraft do the same, maintaining a proper interval so that the deck will be clear of the previous plane by the time the next is ready to land.
As I break, I pull off the power to slow down, drop the landing gear and tail hook and begin the carrier landing check off list. The goal is to have the plane set up properly when I reach the 180 or abeam position. As the speed drops, I put in full flaps and retrim the aircraft to fly at the slower speed. I adjust the engine controls so that they are properly set up for full power in case I have to take a wave-off and go around for another try.
Flying downwind, I reach a position abeam the ship and report to the landing signal officer (LSO) that I am at the 180, wheels, flaps, and hook down. I take off a little power and begin a turning descent. I am falling behind, relative to the ship, since I am still flying downwind while the ship is steaming upwind. As I approach the 90 degree position, I want to have my plane set up and trimmed to fly at the proper approach speed. This is a few knots above the speed at which the plane will stop flying and spin out of the air, which is the cause of almost all the tension in making a carrier landing. The hours spent making practice landings at the auxiliary field have made it, if not comfortable, at least no longer scary to fly this slow.
To aid the landing pilot, the ship has an optical device that projects a beam of light toward the planes approaching to land. This is the glide path that I want to follow down to a safe touch down in the middle of the arresting gear. Other optical devices give an indication to the pilot that the plane is on the glide path, above it, or below it. I’ll intercept the glide path somewhere between the 90 and 45 degree positions. I’m now scanning between the landing area of the ship, the optical glide path, and my speed and altitude instruments in the cockpit so that I can continue to fly around the pattern safely and intercept the glide path at the right speed and altitude. When I see the optical ball that shows the glide path I report that and continue turning and descending until I enter final approach directly behind the ship. At this point I may get some instructions from the LSO to fine tune that last stage, telling me if I’m a little high, a little low, a little fast, a little slow and so on. I’m about 100 feet above the water and 50-100 yards behind the ship, still descending. As I roll the wings level the rate of descent slows and I fly right up to the stern, crossing over the flight deck and flying down until my tailhook catches one of the arresting gear wires. The wire is attached to an arresting gear engine, which pays out wire under tension to slow my plane from the flying speed at which I caught the wire to a full stop.
Assuming all was successful, the plane bounces to a stop. I get a signal to put on my brakes, then to lift the tailhook, lift my flaps, and then to release brakes and taxi forward to clear the landing area so the next pilot can land. I’ll also get the signal to fold my wings, which Navy planes do so they don’t take up so much parking space. I’m directed to a parking space, given the signal to kill the engine, and the flight is over.
I’ve made this sound routine, because, when we are flying every day, it is. Making a carrier landing is just the way a navy pilot at sea finishes a flight. If we haven’t been flying for awhile, or if the weather is bad, or there are heavy seas causing the deck to pitch, then it’s less than routine. If the plane is coming back from combat (something I have never experienced) and may have battle damage, or a hung bomb or rocket, that’s another tension maker. But there are a lot of people there to help. For instance, there’s a guy with binoculars whose only job is to make sure that your landing gear, flaps, and tailhook are all down as you said they were and that the plane is not visibly damaged. There’s another who is keeping track of your speed, and reporting to the LSO if you are faster or slower than you should be. Usually the LSO already knows this, because he knows how the plane looks and behaves when it is on the correct speed or slow or fast. And there’s the LSO, who is highly experienced at watching planes land on a carrier and watches each plane come aboard from the time it picks up the glide path until it lands.
He is also the guy who can wave you off if things aren’t right. When I get a wave-off I hope it’s because of a fouled deck, meaning there was something wrong in the landing area so I couldn’t land. But it also could have been because I was doing something wrong that would not result in a good landing or doing something dangerous that could result in my breaking the airplane and harming myself. So a wave-off is always taken seriously. If I get the wave-off signal I add full power, slap my landing gear lever to the up position to reduce drag, and make a left turn out of the pattern, then straighten and fly along the port side of the ship, climbing to 500 feet, and bringing up the flaps once I have a proper speed. Then I take interval in the pattern and try again.
Then there are night carrier landings. Some pilots dislike them. I always rather enjoyed them. The reason is that in the dark, all the distractions are invisible, the landing area is picked out in lights, and you just watch the glide path and your instruments and fly right on in. If it’s dark and raining, that can be scary because visibility is reduced.
I wrote in my profile that I was a Navy carrier pilot “when I was young and foolish.” That wasn’t lightly said. I enjoyed every minute of it, even those minutes when I realized I had just gotten out of a situation in which I might have been killed. Especially those minutes. What I didn’t realize at the time, and didn’t realize until much later, is how much I still had to learn to be the best of the best. I ended my naval career before I reached that point for the very mundane reason that marriage and a child had put an end to my desire to go to sea for six months at a time. Actually, it didn’t put an end to that. I still would have enjoyed going to sea. What I wouldn’t have enjoyed was being separated from my wife and kids for that long. So I got out after seven years active duty, spent a few more years flying in the reserves, and hung up my flight suit for good.
Tim Hibbetts, – Carrier operations are a mind-numbingly complex arrangement of technologies and procedures. It took most of a century to go from Eugene Ely, sliding off the bow of the USS Birmingham in 1910, to the violent ballet we have now. Likewise, a college grad isn’t going to strap in to a Hornet, diploma still warm, and start buzzing around the Nimitz. Naval aviators spend years learning to fly, learning to employ an aircraft as a weapon, then learning to wield that weapon from a heaving piece of floating steel hundreds of miles from land. The lessons are written in blood. They are studied with reverence.
Day operations and low-visibility/night operations are two different games, so let’s take them separately.
Day
You catch sight of the carrier about 20 miles out through the haze. Even after several years, it still stirs an emotional response. The thing is so big. And so small. It’s big when you have to clean it or paint it, but small when you have a rumor or need to land on it. You’re about 10 minutes prior to your Charlie time (when your hook should be crossing the ramp) and you’ve checked in with the group’s air defense ship. You’re coming down to your marshaling altitude before you pop the 10 nautical mile bubble around the ship. That will minimize your chances of swapping paint with someone. Your wingman is now in tight formation, so he’s not helping you look around to clear the airspace. You’re essentially flying both planes, so your head is on a swivel. If you see another aircraft at the last second, you can certainly jerk away to avoid it, but you’re just going to send your wing man to his death, so “vigilance” isn’t just a noun.
As you come in, you marvel at what a beautiful day it is; light winds, calm seas, few clouds: a perfect day around the boat. Once the weather kicks in or the sea state starts the deck pitching, things get … interesting.
You’re stacked up overhead with the rest of the recovering aircraft, an average of 6-12 of you. There are two squadrons assigned at 2000′ and another two 1000′ feet higher until you run out of squadrons (topping off usually at 5 or 6000′ for the E-2, depending on the air wing). You’re at the bottom of the stack and your wingman is hanging on tight. A section (2 jets) from your sister-squadron is across the circle from you. You’re hawking the deck to see when the last guy goes off the waist catapult so they can wrap it and start the recovery (the advantage of the angled deck is in being able to shoot off the bow and recover simultaneously). They launch aircraft before recovering the previously launched bunch to clear up space, which is good, because you’re going to need it. You need to trap, get out of the wires, and taxi clear of the landing area in time for the guy 45 seconds behind you to land and do the same thing.
You keep an eye shifting from the jets across the circle to the jets on the waist cat, continually updating if you’re going to be in a better position to break the deck (land first). They’re taxiing the last two guys up to the waist cats and it looks like you’re in a better position than the guys across from you, so you drop your hook to tell your wingman that you’re starting down. You hear the radio check from the ship, calling out the winds. This is a good clue you’ve started down at the right time. You note the winds and check the sea state and ship’s wake. You tighten the turn a little to improve your positioning and ease the power higher—slowly, so your wingman can keep up with you. It’s mid-cruise and you’re feeling sparky, so maybe it’s time to up your game. You’re grabbing a bag of knots and are going to break as early as your nerves will let you. You’re thinking about the stern (or round-down as it’s called), but no later than the island. You roll out a couple miles behind the boat, your wingman tucked in nice and tight as you continue accelerating. You’re down at 800′, pushing 400+ knots, and approaching the stern, a hundred feet or so starboard of the ship. If you were above your max trap weight, you’d have been dumping fuel, turning the dumps off just about now, but your fuel is fine. You’ve been monitoring it the whole time, always aware of how much you have, how much you want to recover with, and how much is required if you have to go to the divert field (bingo fuel) or, if you’re blue water with no divert field in range, how much you need in order to meet up and grab some gas off the recovery tanker.
You check your wingman one more time as you reach the stern. You kiss him off (a hand motion with that actual name that lets him know not to follow), throw the stick over, stand on the left wing, and pull hard, thumbing out the speed brake and yanking the throttle to idle at the same time. The humid air and low pressure makes a little humpback cloud on the top of your jet, trailing back a little bit as you pull around. You’re aiming to be at the magic spot abeam the LSO platform (Landing Signal Officer or Loser Standing Outside, with their cool sunglasses, working on a nice hand and face tan, see What is it like to be a Landing Signal Officer (LSO)? for more information) a mile out with your gear down and close to on-speed (the speed for the rest of the approach and landing, usually around 140-ish knots). The way you’re coming in, on-speed will happen about the time you slide into groove (hopefully).
The LSOs (or “paddles”), along with the Air Boss in the tower (and his helper and eventual successor, the Mini-Boss), are tasked with the safe and expeditious recovery of aircraft. The LSOs are the experts in landing aboard the ship. They are also pilots and they’re ready on the radio to advise you if you’re not in landing parameters. As an added bonus, they grade every landing and the grades are posted in each ready room for all eyes to see.
Yay.
In the daytime, little is said on the radios, so unless there’s some safety of flight issue or the pilot is not correcting a gross error, you don’t talk to them, they don’t talk to you. A group of them will later shamble through the ready rooms and give you your grade. You smile (or grimace), say “Thanks, paddles”, wonder how they saw all that stuff you didn’t, then secretly question if they molest small animals and whether their parents knew each other.
Nobody gets a “Good” unless they’re on fire, so let’s not talk about that. If you make a couple minor errors, it’s “OK”, larger errors earns you a “Fair”, gross errors a “No Grade”, and dangerous stuff a “Cut Pass”. That’s if you stop. If you’re so far out of parameters that they have to send you around, a “Wave Off” is the same grade as a “Cut Pass”. If you sail over the wires, a “Bolter” is in between “fair” and “no grade”. You’re always working for the OK-3 (catching the third of the four wires). You can have a glorious flight, but if you goon up the landing, it ruins your day. It sucks, but unless you’re in combat, it’s all about looking good around the boat. Buy it out in the middle of the ocean, everyone laments your loss. Buy it at the ship, people will be watching it on tape for the next 50 years. It’s not entertainment—it’s “don’t do what this guy did”.
So, you’re abeam, 600′, and below 250 knots, that break-turn having bled-off a lot of speed. You dropped the gear once you saw that magic number come up, helping you to slow further to your on-speed mark. Now for a little descent in the turn so you can be at the 90º position at 450′. You can’t float the turn or you’ll be too far behind the ship, or “long in the groove.” That can mess up the interval of your wingman. They’ll wave you off so it doesn’t screw him up. If you’re too close behind the ship, the LSOs won’t have enough time to gauge your approach and they’ll send you around to unscrew your program. You may also be too tight on the guy in front of you, if there is one. You’re Goldie Locks, looking for everything to be just right.
You’re jockeying the throttles the whole time, first getting to speed (idle), catching on-speed (power up), then to compensate for the turn (more power), increase your descent (less power), then rolling wings level in the groove (less power). There’s a sweet spot of the throttles, but it’s never stationary, so you’re pumping the throttles, bracketing it. If you stop moving the throttles, it means you’re about to go high or low. As you come around into the groove—the last 3/4 mile behind the ship when your wings are level—you start to pick up the “ball”. OK, OK,, so you started peeking at the 45, but everyone’s always said it’s not aligned for good information at that angle. Still, a peek is worth a thousand scans.
The Fresnel Lens Optical Landing System is going to show you—when everything is aligned—how high you are compared to the ideal. The green reference lights show where the ball should be and the it rises and falls based on your distance from the optimum glide path. Way out at 3/4 of a mile, each of the five cells is about 30′ high, so you’d have go 30′ higher to show one cell of motion up. Once you cross the ramp, you only have to go up or down 2.4′ to show a whole cell of motion. When you touch down, to put the hook in between the 2- and 3-wire, your eyes are going to be in an 18″ high window. If the ball is at the top, you’re going to sail over the wires. If it’s at the bottom, it turns red and means you’re dangerously close to striking the ramp and potential catastrophe.
Hopefully you’ve come around the corner about a half-ball high and are now just milking it down, pumping the throttle back just a hair, then pump, pump, pump. Your stick is rock solid. You go fast or slow with the stick and up or down with the motors. Now that you’re in the groove, the ball is showing you good information, so you really want to just stare at it. Oh, god, you so long to lock your eyes on it and never look away. So pretty…
But, the landing area is angled 9º to the left of the rest of the ship and the ship is undoubtedly moving. That means that the runway is sidling away to the right the whole time you’re coming down. It’s also highly unlikely that the wind is coming right down the angle, so you’re working a bit of a crosswind, likely from the right as well. So you keep putting little right wing dips in there to keep you on centerline. And all this wing-wagging is screwing with that sweet spot on the throttle quadrant, so don’t forget to keep pumping the juice.
You have to constantly scan across the green datum lights to the landing area and back. This is going to help you fix your line-up problem as well as show ball motion more quickly than if you’re staring at it. Stop staring!
Now is about the time you hit the burble. I sure hope you were thinking about it prior to it happening, because if the ship is making most of its own wind, that dude’s going to drop you a whole ball low while you work to recover. That big island on the right side of the ship is nicely situated to disrupt the airflow once you’re about 1/2 to 1/4 mile behind. It can be a little hiccup or it can be a black hole. Your experience and the LSO’s calls are going to be the best cues. You’re checking the ship’s wake, the white caps, the LSO’s lone wind call before the recovery, what it was like when you were walking to the jet earlier, everything. Once you’re out of the burble, you have to pull off more power. Not only is the burble gone, but the air rising over the deck is pumping more lifties into the wings. You’re going high if you don’t correct.
In a modern jet, the neatest gizmo is the heads-up display (HUD). The velocity vector is telling you where you’re going at the moment and all you have to do is keep it in the landing zone. That’s going to work until you’re in-close (about 1/4 of a mile). The ball really gets sensitive by then, so your scan shifts more heavily to the ball again.
The rest is focus and concentration, while always keeping your eyes moving. Keep covering the sweet spot by pumping the throttles, keep on centerline, make sure you’re not jerking the nose around. If you start going high and push down the nose, all you’re doing is raising the tail. The hook will sail over the wires and you’re going around to the sing-song call “Bolter, bolter!”
You’ve been working so hard that it’s natural to just give up once you’re over steel, but you still have a lot of flying to do. Keep working and hitting the deck should be a surprise. Once you touch down, your thumb retracts the speed brake and those throttles go to full military power, staying there until you come to a complete, resolute, unmistakable stop. That jerk, going from 140 knots to nothing in 300 feet, is pretty significant—everything about you wants to keep going forward. That wire stopping you is pretty insistent, though, as is your five-point harness. Of course, all the squishy bits still press forward. It takes a couple seconds for their disappointment to resolve and send them back to their appointed locations. It’s even more exciting if you forgot to lock your harness. That usually only happens once, though, as the forward throw of your upper body for all to see is both uncomfortable and embarrassing. When you see a guy almost disappear below the canopy rail, bent forward, head just about hitting the instrument panel, you can’t help but chuckle (nervously).
Once you’re stopped, throttles to idle with one hand and throw a thumbs up to the maintenance chief with the other. He’s waiting to see the aircraft state so he knows if it needs to be sidelined (meaning a different taxi route). Then wait for the wire to tug you back a few feet so the wire falls off the hook and you can retract it. Your yellow-shirt (the deck crewman who directs aircraft on the flight deck) is giving you the power-up signal and frantically waving you to get out of the landing area. You juice the throttles and crank in some right rudder pedal to start moving in that direction. Some more fine motion taxiing and you’re chocked and chained, cleared to shut down, unstrap, and climb out. Watch for all the other stuff around you as you clear the flight deck, though; it can be one of the most dangerous places on Earth and after what you just went through, getting Ginsu’ed by a turning prop would be pretty embarrassing.
Night
All aviators know that black air is unlike any other color of air. It’s thicker, making the engines churn more and even knock a bit. It’s full of odd noises and makes your plane less fuel efficient. Gravity is also stronger in black air, as are both flavors of luck. Black air sucks.
You can’t stack overhead and coming raging in at the speed of heat at night or in really low visibility, so they set you up on a Case III profile.
Each aircraft has its own altitude and mileage for marshalling, with each successive aircraft 1000′ higher and one mile farther than the preceding one. Each will leave the point one minute behind the one before it, on the minute, at 250 knots, on the marshal heading. If you’re off more than 10 seconds, you have to fess up. It’s monumentally embarrassing and can mess up the recovery timing. You do the math and you hit the mark. You set your radar altimeter (RADALT) to 1000′ so you don’t zone out and drill a hole in the ocean 5 miles behind the ship.
It’s been done.
More than once.
That fact that burns into you, because you replaced a guy who did it a few months before you showed up. You’re even sleeping in his rack. Death can be very personal.
On a clear night, you can tell that one of the lights out there in the distance is the ship (sometimes it’s hard to tell, though). There are also other lights. There’s the picket ship a couple miles aft, there to pick up anyone that has to shell out and isn’t grabbed by the helo in starboard delta. That’s the helicopter circling on the right side of the ship. He’s one of the slow moving lights. There are the lights nearby that are the other jets in the stack, zipping by above or below you. Every once in a while, closer to push time, you can see a very bright light from an afterburner plume as someone is launched from the ship. If it’s not a bad night, that light goes away in a second or two. If it’s really dark, or the sea is whipping about, dudes will sit in blower for several seconds, grabbing several hundred more feet of altitude before the pucker factor lets them pull the throttles back to military power.
Adding and subtracting at 12,000′ is higher math and it looks like you’re going to hit your push about 2 seconds early. Very nice. So, now you’re concentrating on hitting your numbers, keeping your interval with speed control, making the proper calls, and just doing whatever you can not to think about that one night you had in the barrel. The deck was moving a bit, but going around three times in a row was still pretty disturbing. And that was a long time ago. You’ve had some really good nights since then and paddles and the skipper feel pretty good about where you are in the squadron. Keep talking yourself up, because it’s mighty dark out and the ship looks to have moved into some weather. It’s just like the ship drivers to find the only cloud bank in the whole ocean and drive into it. No big deal; another chance to excel.
The controller has started calling your position, which jibes with what your instruments are telling you. Once they lock you up with the approach radar, you could couple up and let the autopilot and ship’s system drive you right into a perfect 3. Most of the time. If it breaks you off in close, you have to be pretty good to recover, so most squadrons don’t let nuggets even try it. Once you have a whole cruise under your belt, you should be all clear. Not that you’re going to do it, though. You’ve seen the skipper and XO do it, but they are fantastic ball flyers and don’t have to prove anything. No one else is going to let the computer land his jet.
You press on.
Because that’s where the food is.
The controller on the ship confirms that they’ve locked you up and tells you to fly “needles” and you keep pressing in, resetting your RADALT to 400’ to warn you that it’s time to start looking for a ship. Looking through the HUD at nothing but instrumentation, you start breaking out of the clouds at about a mile, the ship suddenly looming right there where it should be. At about 300′ above the water, they tell you, “3/4 of a mile, on and on, call the ball”. You’ve been checking it out for a bit now, making sure that things look good. Spermy (the velocity vector) is out on the bow, but coming slowly to the landing area, the ball is centered up, needles are on and on. You’ve already checked your fuel state and taken off a couple hundred pounds for the last few seconds since you noted it, “411, Hornet ball, 5.5”. So, you’ve told them your side number, your aircraft type, and your fuel state, in thousands of pounds. Everyone references that state for all the various triggers it will trip, such as when to tank, when to bingo somewhere else, when to rig the barricade.
So, you’re sounding as confident as you can on the radio and paddles reciprocates with an easy, buy-you-a-drink, “Roger, ball, 15 knots axial”. There are a number of specific calls he can make to help you out if he starts seeing you do stuff and you’re not recognizing it. No one else talks on the radio after the ship tells you to call the ball until about 45 seconds later, after you’ve trapped. The LSO owns the radio.
At this point, things are actually smoother than daytime. You’re inside 3/4 of a mile, wings level, working the same sweet spot for several minutes. You’ve had time to think about the burble, the LSO has given you the winds, so things are going great. You don’t even register that your heart is pumping really hard.
You hear a very faint, “liii-ttle power” and juice up that sweet spot an iota. You didn’t see the ball move, but paddles might have seen a trend coming on. Hopefully you caught it and are still shooting for the OK. If you hear a hard call, you just bought a Fair (or worse), but things should still be cool.
Now here’s where things get interesting and the first time you did this, it was so surprising, you gave a good shot of power and sailed over the wires. You’ve been in near pitch black for a couple hours, the eerie green glow of the instruments and HUD your only light. In fact, you turned them way down so you can have better night vision for picking up the ship and what cues you can from outside. But just as you cross the ramp, it’s like you’ve walked into you surprise birthday party. All the lights come on bright and about a second later, a thousand people scream, “KA-BOOM!”
In order to increase safety, they keep the lights on the carrier deck up pretty high so people can better see what they’re doing. With your amped-up night vision, it’s almost like daylight when you get to the level of the island and its lights blast you. You havemaybe one more play to grab the wire you’re aiming for. Too much power here means doing this all over. You’d climb up to 1200 feet and they’d have to cycle you into the pattern. To make space, they have to vector a couple other guys around and it starts messing up the process. The whole ship, along with the picket, have to keep steaming in this direction for an extra few minutes just because you can’t do your job right. There was that one guy, on work-ups, that went around twice and made the ship steam into the LAX traffic corridor. Yeah, that was a visit to the Captain.
Not fun.
But things are all right; one quick power adjustment and you just see the ball sink half-a-cell low as the ship smacks you from below—hard. The power comes up, boards come in, and you feel that powerful, reassuring pressure on the shoulder straps. You look over to the right and can tell by where you are that you grabbed the 2-wire. Dang it! OK, full stop, pull back to idle, let the wire tug you back, hook up, juice the power to stop, then find your yellow shirt, with his bright, yellow wands. There! Yeah, yeah, get out of the landing area, I got it. You’re not jamming it up there like in the day, plus you have a couple extra seconds before the jet behind you is breathing down your tailpipe, but still… there’s a sense of urgency. A quick couple circles with your finger light is the night-time “thumbs up” to the maintenance chief. When the night is really dark and the excitement level is high enough, it’s easy to slip into afterburner upon landing and sit there at the end of the spool with two 15’ gouts of flame behind you. That’s not embarrassing, but you’re not going to make the ship go any faster. It’s just another indicator to what kind of night it is (and sometimes who’s flying).
The first yellow-shirt hands you off to the next one and he gets you heading up to the bow, handing you off in turn as you move farther out from the huge, yellow lights on the island. It starts getting really dark again and you’re moving more and more carefully as you get to the bow. They have you taxiing right onto the white line that separates steel from air, with your nose over the water. This sucks, but he has a better view of what your wheels are doing and these guys are masters. They go through so much training and have so much experience that you trust them implicitly. The fact that you’re an officer and he’s enlisted has no bearing on what you two are doing. In fact, it might be a “she”. In all that gear and at night, there’s no telling and it doesn’t matter. Your director is getting you to your parking spot and it’s only a slow version of that delicate dance you just performed in the landing area. And parking just a couple inches from the jet next to you to conserve precious deck space is fine work. You do what he tells you and hope things work out. Disappointment is extraordinary.
A final stop, a rolling-hands dance-move with the wands and you’re in your spot, the yellow-shirt calling for chocks and chains, letting the plane captain take over, who calls for the shutdown. You pop your mask and breathe in and out a couple times before unstrapping, grabbing all your stuff, and climbing gingerly out of the cockpit, touching down on the flight deck with more relish than you’d admit to. From here, you’re going to find the nearest ladderwell down and just make your way back to the ready room from within the ship. There is no reason on God’s Green Earth that you need to be walking around on the flight deck at night when you don’t have to. It doesn’t matter how many knee-knockers you have to clamber through.
After all, it’s home.
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